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Sitemap indexing

Intermediate & Advanced SEO

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Adriaan.Multiply last edited by
Hi everyone,

Here's a duplicate content challenge I'm facing: Let's assume that we sell brown, blue, white and black 'Nike Shoes model 2017'. Because of technical reasons, we really need four urls to properly show these variations on our website. We find substantial search volume on 'Nike Shoes model 2017', but none on any of the color variants.

Would it be theoretically possible to show page A, B, C and D on the website and:
- Give each page a canonical to page X, which is the 'default' page that we want to rank in Google (a product page that has a color selector) but is not directly linked from the site
- Mention page X in the sitemap.xml. (And not A, B, C or D).
So the 'clean' urls get indexed and the color variations do not?

In other words: Is it possible to rank a page that is only discovered via sitemap and canonicals?
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